Annual increase in energy demand in China drops to 2%

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just released the World Energy Outlook for 2017 (WEO-2017). It identifies major trends in the energy sector through 2016. Growth in solar PV capacity was larger than for any other form of generation. Since 2010, costs of new solar PV have come down by 70%, wind by 25% and battery costs by 40%.

The United States has become the biggest oil and gas producer in the world driven by of shale gas and tight oil. But in 2016, spending by the world’s consumers on electricity reached the same level as their spending on oil products.

China, the world’s largest energy consumer, is shifting to a services-oriented economy and a cleaner energy mix. Energy demand growth slowed from 8 % per year from 2000 to 2012 to less than 2% per year since 2012. China’s energy policy is now focused on cleaner energy sources driven primarily by severe air pollution in Chinese cities. It is estimated that almost 2 million premature deaths each year can be ascribed to poor air quality.

Latest research supports the work many years ago of Robert Howarth at Cornell who argued that leakages and other abnormal emissions of methane during fracking and other oil and gas operations erased the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.

Environmental Indexes

From Our Files

A recent study presents evidence that regional warming over the Arctic Ocean can affect mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere continental weather. This study shows that there are two key Arctic regions where regional warming can induce distinguishable cold winters over northern continents. Warming over the Barents–Kara Sea region is likely to lead to East Asian cooling, whereas northern North America cooling is closely related to warming over the East Siberian–Chukchi Sea region.

Evidence that methane emissions from natural gas production have been considerably underestimated by the EPA was recently reinforced by the initiation of an investigation into how the EPA estimates methane emissions by the EPA’s Inspector General. If it is found that emissions of methane from natural gas production are considerably greater than current estimates, the advantage that natural gas has over coal will be eroded and the advantage of switching to natural gas as a cleaner form of energy diminished.

Approximately 800,000 years ago something changed in the Earth’s climate system that led to the climate then following a series of approximately 100,000 year cycles. Small, predictable changes in the Earth’s orbit about the Sun act as triggers for the glacial and interglacial periods, but other factors such as ice sheet volume, CO2 concentration, and biological feedback mechanisms are also involved.

A reanalysis of the effect of black carbon emissions has found that it is second only to carbon dioxide emissions in its warming impact on the climate. Together carbon dioxide, black carbon, and methane emissions represent the anthropogenic sources with the largest impact on Earth’s climate.